Ryan Bundy fought with government long before Oregon standoff

It took three bailiffs to take Ryan Bundy into custody last year in a Utah courthouse, where they were trying to arrest him on a failure-to-appear warrant.

Bundy began yelling and pulling away before being subdued, said Lt. Del Schlosser, a spokesman for Utah's Iron County Sheriff's Office. Schlosser said Bundy spent 19 hours in jail, and he must return in March to face a charge of interfering with an arresting officer.

Bundy, 43, has been resisting government incursions on his life large and small since long before he, two brothers and several friends took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns six days ago.

Since 2006, Bundy has rejected the authority of animal control officers to corral his roaming horse, school officials to bar his 15-year-old daughter from carrying a pocketknife and city officials to regulate his fires, his property's appearance and his driving, court records and news reports show.

"Zoning is communism," Bundy told The Spectrum, a newspaper in St. George, Utah, in September after he was cited for having an unlicensed dump truck on his land. The charge was dismissed.

"I'm not their serf, and I'm not their slave," Bundy said. "They are not the master of my property."

Bundy is the eldest of the 14 children of Cliven Bundy, the Bunkerville, Nevada rancher whose 2014 standoff with the Bureau of Land Management over $1 million in unpaid grazing fees and penalties made the family iconic in the country's swiftly growing patriot movement.

In a brief phone conversation Thursday, Bundy declined to discuss past criminal charges. He said he wanted attention to instead be paid to his current mission: returning Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to those he says are the land's rightful owners -- the residents of Harney County.

"I have always stood up for freedom and liberty," he said.

LEGAL PAPER TRAIL

Bundy's current profession and residence are somewhat unclear based on public records.

He was licensed as a general contractor in Utah under the name R C Bundy Inc. until recently. He was qualified in general engineering, steel erection and general concrete, but his license expired Nov. 30. The company seems hardly to advertise. Its Facebook page has 3 likes, and its website isn't functional.

He told a reporter in 2015 that he was living in Nevada.

Bundy's lingering legal troubles include failure-to-appear warrants linked to traffic citations in the Colorado City, Ariz., area along the Utah border. Most of the charges are related to lack of documentation: no current registration, no valid license and no proof of insurance.

In Utah, his legal paper trail is more extensive and dates back 10 years, including:

2006: Cited for burning without a permit during a restricted period. He pleaded guilty, paid a $100 fine and was sentenced to probation for six months.

2007: Arrested on suspicion of interfering with a legal arrest. He waived his right to an attorney and demanded a jury trial, only to change his plea to no contest on the day of the scheduled trial. He was sentenced to six months of probation in November 2008, ordered to take a life skills class and fined $500, court records show. No further details were available Thursday.

2011: Found guilty of several vehicle-related citations, including an equipment violation and driving on a restricted license.

2012: Arrested on an allegation of misdemeanor theft. A judge ordered the charges to be dropped if Bundy fulfilled 18 months of probation.

2013: Charged with a public nuisance stemming from an allegedly unregistered vehicle on his Cedar City, Utah, property.

2014: Charged with interfering with an animal officer. He pleaded no contest in April 2015, but not before he was arrested on a failure-to-appear warrant. He ended up paying a $150 fine.

Bundy's eventful arrest at the Cedar City courthouse in 2015 stemmed from the 2014 animal case.

Bundy was accused of trespassing on city property to take back a horse an animal control officer had found running near the Cedar City airport.

The officer took the horse to an animal shelter, but the horse was gone when the officer checked on it the next day, the Salt Lake Tribune reported. The officer later found the animal had been corralled on Bundy's property.

Bundy refused to accept a written citation, forcing the officer to slip the paper through his open window, the St. George News reported. He was later charged with interfering with an animal control officer. After he failed to appear in court, a judge issued a warrant for his arrest.

Authorities got their opportunity in January 2015.

Bundy told The Spectrum newspaper that he traveled to the Cedar City, Utah, courthouse because he had to attend a hearing on the 2013 nuisance charge.

A bailiff spotted Bundy after his arrival and ordered him arrested.

Afterward, Bundy told the St. George News that he had brought his 13-year-old daughter with him to Utah but didn't want to give authorities any details about her or her location.

"I wouldn't have let that information out," the newspaper quoted him saying. "I would've rather her fend for herself than to let her into the hands of more government."

He said his daughter had nowhere to go while he was in jail. She ended up staying with a neighbor.

Bundy has been tending to the fallout from the Iron County courthouse arrest even in the past two weeks.

Court records show he emailed a records request on Dec. 31, two days before protesters walked in and took control of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.

POLITICAL CAUSES

It's not just the criminal justice system that has caused Bundy to bristle.

He pulled his children out of school in Clark County, Nevada, in September 2014 after school officials wouldn't allow his 15-year-old daughter to carry a pocketknife.

Bundy called the knife ban a violation of his children's rights.

"They're trying to make my child a criminal - and any other child a criminal - for simply having something, and that is not right," he told KSNV, a Las Vegas television station.

"I've taught my children a knife is important to have," he said. "It's a tool that you use, and you need to have one with you at all times."

Bundy twice sought political office. In 2008, he ran for a seat in the Utah House of Representatives as a Constitution Party candidate.

Among the party's positions in Utah is that all federal lands managed by the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management should he turned over to the state. The party also advocates local control of law enforcement and rejection of federal money for that purpose.

In 2012, Bundy ran for the same seat, District 72 in southern Utah, as a Republican, news reports show.

The issue that's been most prominent for Bundy publicly has been government's role in land management, and it's been especially pronounced in the past two years.

The highest profile protest was in April 2014, when he vocally defended his father in Nevada. Federal authorities started rounding up hundreds of cattle due to 20 years of unpaid grazing fees, and hundreds of protesters held off federal agents until they backed down.

No charges have been filed stemming from the 2014 standoff.

The month after the ranch showdown ended, Ryan Bundy helped lead an ATV ride through Recapture Canyon, an area of southeastern Utah where off-road vehicles had been restricted to protect Ancestral Puebloan archeological sites.

Although the Salt Lake Tribune reported that Bundy was among the ride's "more strident supporters", shouting down the suggestion that protesters avoid restricted areas, Bundy never faced charges.

Then came the Harney County refuge takeover, which started Jan. 2.

His younger brother Ammon Bundy is the main spokesman for the movement, cool and collected in a flanel jacket and close-cropped beard. Ryan Bundy is often at his brother's shoulder, in a cowboy hat and leather vest.

Early history of conflict

Bundy's disdain for federal control of access to federally managed conservation areas dates back much further, to his early 20s.

In 1994, Bundy was arrested after a 21-mile chase through southern Utah's famed Zion National Park, Forbes reported. Bundy was identified then as a member of a "local constitutionalist/'wise use' extremist group" that had threatened park rangers in the past, the news magazine reported.

The incident that precipitated the chase?

Rangers had received a tip from local police that a man had filled up his gas tank and left without paying, a National Park Service incident report shows. The man then drove to the park and refused to pay the entrance fee, saying he intended only to move cattle.

The driver stopped when a patrol ranger pulled him over, but he resisted identifying himself, the report said. He told the ranger the federal government had no authority on Utah lands and no right to stop him.

The driver then sped off and drove around spike strips laid in the road, narrowly missing a state trooper. A roadblock stopped him about 20 miles down the road.

The federal government dismissed the case against Bundy, Forbes reported, and Utah dismissed a felony charge of failure to stop at the command of a peace officer after Bundy entered into a diversion agreement.